Tuesday, January 3, 2012

Old Year - New Year: My take

First of all, happy new year to every body out there reading this!

2011 was probably the craziest and most exciting years of my life. For a start I begun to do Consulting work as solutions architect and technical lead which led me to really interesting lessons and experiences. After that, I moved to London, UK permanently. Moving to a new house is a big effort, but try that on a totally new country and even a different continent. As soon as I arrived, I started to work with R/GA as Solutions Architect and it has been a blast, all along getting familiar with the British accent, the ins and outs of the daily London life and on top of that, travelling like crazy visiting old and new places. Also, it has been a tough year in the family since a close relative has been very sick (hopefully getting better in the past last month).

Technology wise it has been quite exciting too. At the beginning of the year I started working on a big interactive betting system for a huge client in Hong Kong. The project involved ASP.NET, SQL Server, Windows Services, WCF Services, REST services, MySQL, Flash, WebORB, IIS, Networking, Load Balancing, Dependency Injection with the Enterprise Library Unity Application Blog, Unit Testing with MS Unit Test, Team Foundation Server, sockets and a few more. I was able to lead the development team, interface with the client and take a huge solution from the white board to the consumer, with a few trips to New York in the middle. Unfortunately I couldn’t visit Hong Kong at the end of it because I was already in the process to move to the UK.

Once in R/GA I had to learn a few new (or not that new but unfamiliar) development approaches and tools. Team City, NAnt, MS Build and Subversion replaced Team Foundation Server, NUnit, Moq, NBehave (BDD) replaced MS Test, StructureMap replaced MS Unity App Block. Besides that I was able to jump straight away into ASP.NET MVC 3.0 and continue working with SQL server, LINQ, and several common design patterns (Factory, Repository, CoC, IoC, Singletton, Observer, etc.).

Towards the end of the year I was able to make a little room for all the cool stuff popping all over the place. Windows Phone, Windows 8, Surface 2.0, Kinect, Silverlight 5, Entity Framework, WPF 4.0 and a lot more. It was a busy end of year but very productive.

Oh, I forgot to mention that I also quit smoking and start to have a healthier life (more home made lunch, a lot more water, less coffee and less sodas).

I have been able to even made a little room to keep studying bass and music theory, although I’m always way behind of where I would like to be !

Anyways, for this new year I’ll keep focused on emerging platforms, hopefully not only on the .NET side. Social media and analytics will become a main trend, as we haven’t seen before. In the next couple of years, the Windows Ecosystem will become the biggest interconnected functional platform out there, beating Apple and Amazon by far. Windows 8 will help Tablets and Slates become the norm, Mobile will continue to evolve, and gestures and speech recognition will start to populate main stream applications. I can assure you that the next couple of years will be incredibly exciting for technology and emerging platforms, even if the economic situation keeps a little down.

I hope to get a lot more into Entity Framework and LinqToSql, the Azure cloud platform, gestures and new interaction behaviours, and also keep with my art projects on the side, trying to keep missing them into my technical skills and maybe…just maybe make a few bucks out of them !

Anyways, enough talk, is time to code, play music, paint and keep living the dream !